Today's confirmation that Apple is going x86 makes today a historic day in the industry. It may mean that Microsoft might see a few percent decline of their market share the next few years, but what about Linux? If Linux were to lose an equal amount of share it would alter its spread to the desktop, a spread that has been very positive so far.

It won't effect Linux at all. OS X has the same closed concept that MSFT does which is why people that want to own and control their own computer rather than feel like a renter use *nix now and not Mac or MSFT.

All this change does is makes the CPU they use Intel. Nothing more. What they should have done of course is still thrown the green light for people to build their own clones and still sell their own hardware that way the power users would be satisfied and would develop use it as their platform for open source software but Apple's too greedy to do that.